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This paper argues for the need to create a more animal-centred history of medicine, in which animals are considered not simply as the backdrop for human history, but as medical subjects important in and of themselves. Drawing on the tools and approaches of animal and human–animal studies, it seeks to demonstrate, via four short historical vignettes, how investigations into the ways that animals shaped and were shaped by medicine enables us to reach new historical understandings of both animals and medicine, and of the relationships between them. This is achieved by turning away from the much-studied fields of experimental medicine and public health, to address four historically neglected contexts in which diseased animals played important roles: zoology/pathology, parasitology/epidemiology, ethology/psychiatry, and wildlife/veterinary medicine. Focusing, in turn, on species that rarely feature in the history of medicine – big cats, tapeworms, marsupials and mustelids – which were studied, respectively, within the zoo, the psychiatric hospital, human–animal communities and the countryside, we reconstruct the histories of these animals using the traces that they left on the medical-historical record.

The mechanical and reductive ideals of much of modern science leave it ill-equipped to recognize, let alone account for, the agency of animals. So says a tradition of criticism well represented in the writings of the British behavioural biologist W.H. Thorpe FRS (1902–1986). This paper recovers the range of overlapping debates and developments, philosophical and religious as well as scientific, which led Thorpe to champion animal agency in the period and place much better known now as headquarters for the neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis. A retracing of Thorpe's path through such forgotten domains as applied-science Lamarckism and the philosophical psychology of Leonard Hobhouse complicates a now-standard picture (which Thorpe himself promoted) of the Modern Synthesis as inimical to animal agency. Largely thanks to Thorpe's work, as publicized by Julian Huxley, the Modern Synthesis revitalized the fortunes of what became one of the mainstays of agential science, the Baldwin effect.

In 1976, the animal liberation movement made experiments conducted on cats at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) one of its earliest successful targets. Although the scientific consensus was that Aronson was not particularly cruel or abusive, the AMNH was selected due to the visibility of the institution, the pet-like status of the animals, and the seeming perversity of studying non-human sexuality. I contextualize the controversy in terms of the changing meaning of utilitarian ethics in justifying animal experimentation. The redefinition of ‘surgeries’ as ‘mutilations’ reflected an encounter between the behavioural sciences and social movements. One of the aims of the late 1960s civil rights movements was to heighten Americans’ sensitivity to differing experiences of suffering. The AMNH protesters drew inspiration from a revived utilitarian ethics of universal organismic pain across the lines of species. This episode was also emblematic of the emergence of an anti-statist, neo-liberal ethos in science. Invoking the rhetoric of the 1970s tax revolt, animal liberationists attacked Aronson's ability to conduct basic research with no immediate biomedical application. Without denying the violence involved, an exclusive focus on reading the experiments through the lens of utilitarianism obscures what ethics animated Aronson's research.

This paper examines the agency of the dogs used to develop the Soviet manned space flight programme by considering what the dogs did as experimental subjects, as dog technologies, and as individual dogs in the context of the historically conditioned practices of Soviet science. Looking at how Soviet space researchers refined Pavlovian behaviourism and integrated it into a complex engineering project helps clarify the conditions under which the dogs worked and the assumptions that guided the human researchers. The paper uses theoretical perspectives that contextualize animal agency in terms of relationships and then looks at those relationships from an ethological perspective. This provides a sense of what the dogs did that distinguishes between how humans understand dogs and what we know about dogs’ cognitive and social capacities. The paper proposes a model of animal agency that looks seriously at the dogs’ relationships with human researchers and suggests that the dogs’ significance as historical subjects depends as much on what they did as dogs as it does on how their contributions to the space race were perceived.

Against the background of humanities writing about animal agency, this article examines primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa's work with his ‘research partner’, the chimpanzee Ai, and her conspecifics at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute and in an outdoor laboratory in Guinea from 1976 to 2016. This latest chapter in the history of Japanese primatology describes an attempt at synthesizing benchwork and fieldwork. It examines how what both humans and chimpanzees can do varies across a whole spectrum of scientific practices, bridging the gap between controlled experiments and field observations. While some recent animal studies literature has presented laboratory animals as deprived of agency and thereby implicitly attributed agency to creatures of the wild, this historical and ethnographic account does not take the analytic category of agency for granted, but examines how Japanese primatologists think about the ways in which chimpanzees interact with each other, with humans and with their environment.

This paper explores the ways in which scientists have managed the concept of animal ‘agency’ in twentieth-century field-based studies of animal behaviour. Using a range of popular accounts published between 1868 and 2012, it provides the intellectual and historical context for the sharp increase in field studies of animals – and their popularizations – that took place from the late 1960s on. It argues that the vivid depiction of animal characters and personalities, with individual and community histories intertwined, is firmly grounded in the methodologies adopted for field studies of animal behaviour. It suggests that intellectual interest in animal agency not only itself needs to be historically situated, but also close historiographical attention needs to be paid to the public deployment of the concept for intellectual, political and moral reasons. It concludes that – as far as field studies of animal behaviour are concerned – animals are not just the subjects of research, but can often be treated as active collaborators in the research process.

This paper tracks human–animal entanglements through one particular species, Canis lupus, the wolf, with a view to exploring how this contested predator might be used to unpack normative assumptions about wildlife science, conservation practice and storytelling. The focus of attention here is on Yellowstone National Park and the century-long struggle to eradicate and then restore the wolf based on the shifting rubrics of science and environmental ethics. The ‘wild heart’ of North America and a centre of scientific and popular environmental mythology, Yellowstone presents a useful terrain (both material and contextual) in which to theorize the wolf as an environmental agent and explore its special provenance within an evolving narrative of ecological science. More specifically, the landmark story of restor(y)ation that played out in the national park serves to illuminate the complex web of temporality, narrative and memory that frames our configurations of animal agency. Wiped out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ruminated on in the interwar period, the wolf was returned to ancestral haunts in the 1990s (to great fanfare) as a charismatic poster animal for environmental consciousness and a vital ‘missing link’ in the psychological and biotic fabric of the landscape. Ornamented with what conservationist Aldo Leopold famously called a ‘fierce green fire’, the wolf became a carrier animal for Yellowstone's environmental memory, transporting with it the fates of other threatened species and the promise of an enlightened Ecological Age. Beneath this teleological tale of expanding biological knowledge and ethical awakening lies a convoluted (and interesting) story that reveals the sinuous connections between the material and the imagined animal as well as the challenges and the complexities of reading non-human traces.

Elephants were vital agents of empire. In British Burma their unique abilities made them essential workers in the colony’s booming teak industry. Their labour was integral to the commercial exploitation of the country’s vast forests. They helped to fell the trees, transport the logs and load the timber onto ships. As a result of their utility, capturing and caring for them was of utmost importance to timber firms. Elephants became a peculiar form of capital that required particular expertise. To address this need for knowledge, imperial researchers deepened their scientific understanding of the Asian elephant by studying working elephants in Burma’s jungle camps and timber yards. The resulting knowledge was contingent upon the conscripted and constrained agency of working elephants, and was conditioned by the asymmetrical power relationships of colonial rule.

This paper examines the history of Atlantic salmon conservation in Eastern Canada, with a specific emphasis on Newfoundland's Gander river. Conservation efforts for this iconic species begin in the late 1800s and continue through to the contemporary period. Our work is framed by current debates on the Anthropocene and its implications for environmental conservation. We identify two different historical phases in salmon conservation associated with different socio-ecological assemblages, and different conceptualizations of nature. Drawing on oral histories, we also reveal a third human–salmon entanglement associated with what we call the ‘wilful salmon’. The wilful salmon fits uneasily with the idea of conservation, and in some ways it seems contrary to conservation efforts. It is, nonetheless, a legitimate fish that deserves to be considered and evaluated in a world ‘after nature’.

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanization of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk.

During the period from 1919 to 1970, rat killing was ‘modernized’: official, scientific, commercial, agricultural and county advisers sought ‘rat control’. Scientific expertise on rat parasites and rat control circulated internationally. The risks posed to human health through plague, as traced by researchers who were already expert on the third pandemic, led in the UK to the Rats and Mice (Destruction) Act 1919; and the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture, at Hot Springs, Virginia, USA, 1943 informed its replacement, the Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949. Anticoagulants such as Warfarin developed in the USA at first sold widely in the UK, then later British research on resistance informed subsequent American research. This UK application of international policy and science paralleled the emergence of an official case at Parliamentary level for the national, multidisciplinary and multi-agency approach to rats. Within the UK, animal ecologists under Charles Elton mapped rats in the emergent field of population studies; and new forms of economic costing at MAFF quantified the damage done to farm buildings and machinery and the consumption, soiling and contamination of food, seed and fodder in store. Yet nineteenth-century rat catchers already had an excellent and long-established grasp of rat behaviour, a necessity in either taking or executing their subjects. Though characterized as inefficient, picturesque and craft-based, that vernacular knowledge was reproduced and formalized in the twentieth century through empirical research and evidence-based practice, shaped by experiences at the intersection of human demand, the interests of the (wild and domesticated) animals that humans have preferred, and the endeavours of the rat.